Eastern Europe and Race: Cosmopolitanism and the Post-Yugoslav Condition in Dubravka Ugrešić’s Essays

Abstract

Dubravka Ugrešić is the writer who has, to date, engaged most extensively with the recent transformations in Eastern Europe—from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s to twenty-first century migrations and postcommunist transitions—and this chapter explores how she articulates new modes of global diasporic solidarity from the position of a displaced post-Yugoslav, and, more broadly, as an ‘Eastern European other’ now living in Amsterdam. It examines the characteristics and draws the limits of Ugrešić’s post-Yugoslav cosmopolitanism, but it begins with a somewhat aleatory reference to Riblja Čorba (trans. Fish Soup), one of the most popular rock bands in then Yugoslavia, intended to draw us into some of the complexities of the racial identities handled in Ugrešić’s work and in Eastern Europe.